


Party Planning

by justwhatialwayswanted



Series: Apartment 314 [8]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: (for both pairings), Andrew has bad taste in cake decorating, Birthday, Jean is in this very briefly, M/M, Pre-Relationship, jeremy and andrew have to interact and it goes about as well as you might expect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24871645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justwhatialwayswanted/pseuds/justwhatialwayswanted
Summary: Andrew knows that Jean isn't particularly passionate about his birthday. He'd had to think to figure out how old he was turning this morning. But has that stopped Jeremy from deciding that he's going to throw a surprise party, and Andrew is going to help him do it?Of course not.
Relationships: Jeremy Knox/Jean Moreau, Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Series: Apartment 314 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1785295
Comments: 22
Kudos: 141





	Party Planning

**Author's Note:**

> i don't understand why this one is like >50% longer than the others it just happened, enjoy!

There’s a knock on the door at five PM sharp, and when Andrew opens it he is greeted with the sight of Jeremy Knox, a bunch of balloons, and a bouquet of flowers. He’s still wearing his Spongebob-patterned scrubs.

“You work until six,” Andrew says.

Jeremy beams at him. “Not today! The clinic let me leave early since there were so few appointments for this afternoon. Lucky, right?”

“How fortunate that the children decided to give you part of an afternoon off,” Andrew says, but he steps aside to let Jeremy in. This whole surprise party was Jeremy’s idea, so he may as well get to it. “The cake is cooling, by the way.”

The expression on Jeremy’s face makes Andrew worry for a moment that he’s going to clap his hands like a cheerleader. (Jean has informed him that Jeremy was, in fact, a cheerleader in school. Ever since, Andrew has lived in fear of Jeremy turning up and doing a backflip in their hallway while yelling about football or something.) Fortunately, Jeremy’s hands are full at the moment, so he’s limited to a simple “Awesome!”

It’s been about five seconds and already Andrew cannot  _ wait _ for Jean to get back.

Jeremy sets down the bundle of balloons by the couch, frowns at the bouquet of flowers he’s still holding— well, it’s Jeremy, so it’s less of a frown and more of an absence-of-smile— and says, “Do you have a vase or something?”

“For some reason, yes, we do,” Andrew says, and he takes the opportunity to escape the room and go get it. The vase is plain and tall and a gift from Renee, and usually it sits empty in Andrew’s room, on top of one of his bookshelves. (Originally, it had flowers in it, but they wilted, as flowers do.) He should send her a picture of the vase with flowers in it. She’d probably appreciate it. It’s slightly heavier than Andrew remembers it being, and it’s a bit dusty, which means he should probably be cleaning his room a little more thoroughly, but the dust hasn’t bothered him yet, so as far as he’s concerned, it’s fine.

When he gets back to the living room, Jeremy is kneeling on the floor, fiddling with the precise placement of the balloons in inch-by-inch increments. Andrew lets that happen for about three seconds before he says, “Vase.”

Jeremy’s head snaps up and he catches sight of the vase like an overeager puppy. “Yes! Thank you!”

He takes it from Andrew, quick but without a shred of hesitation, and darts into the kitchen, scooping up the bouquet of flowers along the way, and Andrew is frankly exhausted just watching him. He’s always known Jeremy is enthusiastic, but this seems over the top. Jean doesn’t even really care about his birthday. He’d had to think about how old he was this morning.

But pointing this out to Jeremy will probably not help the situation— or at least, Andrew can’t imagine any way it could help— so he decides to devote his mental energy to figuring out a way to survive until Jean comes back from work and can monopolize all of Jeremy’s attention.

Unfortunately, because nothing is going right for Andrew at the moment, no sooner has he made this decision than he hears a knock on the door.

“Oh  _ no,” _ Jeremy says from the kitchen, and Andrew can hear his distress through the wall that half-separates the kitchen and the living room.

“Jean has keys, he wouldn’t knock,” Andrew reminds him, and then he swings open the front door.

It’s fucking Neil.

Really, Andrew shouldn’t be surprised.

Neil doesn’t seem quite sure what to do with himself, once he realizes Andrew's answered the door. (Andrew has gotten good at identifying the quick downward eye flick from people who were expecting someone of Jean's height and got Andrew instead.) Maybe he forgot Andrew also lives here? Andrew has no idea what goes on in his head most days. Neil’s hands are immediately buried in his pockets, and he opens his mouth and then closes it without saying anything, and that’s so different from the insolent, fucking annoying Neil that Andrew is used to that he finds himself waiting for Neil to say something instead of just shutting the door and going back to trying to ignore Jeremy.

“Is Jean home?” Neil asks.

Andrew takes in his shifting weight— Neil seems to do that a lot— and his hands fisted in the pockets of his cargo shorts, which by the way,  _ disgusting, _ and says, “He’s at work. He’ll be back. You might as well help set up this party while you wait.”

Neil exhales a little and follows him into the apartment, only to be immediately accosted by Jeremy.

“Hi!” Jeremy says as he weaves past Andrew to set the vase of flowers on the coffee table. “Are you Neil?”

“I’m Neil,” he confirms, somewhat awkwardly. He's still got his hands in his pockets, but he seems to have his words back. “And you’re… Jeremy?”

“Jeremy, yeah. Jean’s mentioned you! Welcome to the surprise party setup committee.”

Neil glances between Jeremy, who is simultaneously beaming at him and adjusting the goddamn balloons again, and Andrew, who is fully aware he probably looks like he wants to die.

“Thanks?” he says. “What’s the party for?”

“It’s Jean’s birthday,” Andrew and Jeremy say at the same time, with astonishingly different levels of enthusiasm.

“Jeremy decided to throw him a surprise party,” Andrew adds.

“I brought balloons!” Jeremy says.

Neil looks at the balloons. He looks at Andrew. He looks at Jeremy’s Spongebob scrubs. He looks at Andrew again. He cracks a smile. (But of course, because it’s fucking Neil, it’s more of a smirk.) “Okay."

And that’s all it takes for Jeremy to start throwing instructions at Neil for setting up this party. 

Andrew mostly hangs back and watches. He’s mildly impressed at how much work Jeremy has managed to put into setting up a very small surprise party. At least he didn’t bring streamers.

But the real entertainment begins when Neil decides he also has opinions on balloon placement. 

“They open up the room more if we put them by the window,” he says with probably a little more force than the situation requires.

“But then he won’t see them as soon as he walks in,” Jeremy points out with equal force.

Neil jabs a finger at his preferred balloon spot by the window. “The hallway is shorter than Andrew, he’ll see them in under half a second—”

“Rich coming from you,” Andrew says, and he ignores the way both of them swivel around to look at him in favor of going into the kitchen to make the icing for the cake.

As he’s pouring icing sugar into the mixing bowl, he hears Jeremy say, “Wow, are you an interior designer or something?” without a hint of detectable sarcasm, and Neil reply, “I’m an accountant?”

God.

Andrew focuses on frosting the cake. It’s chocolate with a healthy amount of coffee dumped in the batter, but Jean absolutely refused to let him do anything interesting with the frosting. It’s not Andrew’s fault that Jean doesn’t like gummy worms. But it  _ is _ his birthday, so Andrew’s decided to indulge him. Just this once. So the frosting is vanilla.

His focus is mildly interrupted when Jeremy appears in the doorway and says, "Scissors?"

"Never mind, my keys worked," Neil calls from the living room.

Andrew raises an eyebrow at Jeremy.

"We had to cut some of the balloon strings so we could divide them into separate bunches. Nice frosting!" And with that, Jeremy vanishes again. He really is exceptionally high-energy today. It must be because it's Jean.

Andrew mostly keeps to the kitchen after that as Neil and Jeremy argue decor with far too much enthusiasm. In a way, he's grateful to Neil for turning up out of the blue— now Andrew isn't the target of Jeremy's high-velocity party planning, and from the sound of it, Neil is holding his own quite well. Possibly because he enjoys being contrary. So Andrew is going to stay here and frost a cake as slowly as he possibly can.

He knows when Jean gets back, though, because there's the sound of a key scraping in the lock and Jeremy falls dead silent in the middle of whatever he was saying about jellyfish. (Did they change topics from decorating, or has Jeremy been hiding an aquarium in his pockets? Andrew doesn't know and he hopes he never will.) And the cake has been properly frosted and sitting on the counter for the past thirteen minutes, so it's probably time for Andrew to leave the kitchen.

He pokes his head into the hallway just in time to watch Jean see the balloons and have his moment of realization, which is accompanied by the slightest widening of his eyes that Andrew knows means he is officially surprised.

Then Jeremy yells "happy birthday!" and basically flings himself at Jean (seriously, why didn't he change out of his scrubs? Spongebob is not exactly seductive), and Jean promptly drops his keys on the floor in order to catch him. Neil, who's also made his way out to the hallway, looks mildly baffled, which is funnier to Andrew than it probably should be.

"They've been dancing around each other forever," he says quietly, and Neil blinks at him a few times (and as it turns out, a few feet of distance is still close enough that Andrew can see his eyelashes clearly) before having a visible lightbulb moment and nodding.

"Jean never gave me a straight answer about why he talks about Jeremy so much," he replies in the same undertone. 

"Jean doesn't do anything straight," Andrew says.

At that, Neil's half-smirk comes back. Andrew is starting to think that's just how his face looks. And he looks directly at Andrew— Andrew has never thought of blue eyes as particularly special, but Neil's are clear blue, without a hint of gray or green, and the light dances off of them when he says, "Please. I knew  _ that." _

At that point, Jean and Jeremy disentangle themselves from their suspiciously long hug and Neil breaks eye contact and goes to say hello, and Andrew stands there and reminds himself that Neil's pretty eyes are simply another reason why Andrew hates him. Along with the cargo shorts. 


End file.
